Simple Living the Easy Way, Part IV

To start bringing this series to a close, I'm going to come back around to discussing exactly what I mean by simple living the easy way. What I'm advocating is a mindful relationship with both the machines and the people whose labor we use and depend upon, a relationship based on awareness and out of which flows both gratitude and respect.

Simple. Basic. But not necessarily easy. Awareness needs to be cultivated in each small moment of the day with reminders of our indebtedness and embeddedness in the world around us. Central to this awareness needs to be an acknowledgment that we are not in control but in an ongoing partnership with a myriad of elements.

What I'd like to see is a world in which human labor is fairly valued, in which consumer goods are rare luxuries or investments in the future, in which the sense of entitlement so pervasive in our culture has given way to a gracious and humble acknowledgment of privilege instead of whining and pining for more.

I'd like to see us return to a world in which machines are valuable contributions to our labor rather than throw-away things to be replaced next year with something new, shiny, and a la mode. Down with the planned obsolescence and up with the small-town repair shop. Our throw-away culture with its cheap manufactured goods designed to break or become useless in a year needs to end, and a large part of that means a willingness to buy high-end tools that are designed for a lifetime of use, rather than low-balling and buying the cheapest version the big box store has to sell.

With that, too, would hopefully come a valuation of human labor, a return to craftsmanship and practical knowledge. Enough of the accountants and bankers and lawyers and stock brokers who've made such a mess. Let's start valuing real work with real money. Support the artisans and the farmers and not the MBAs and CEOs.

Sure, I'm biased in all of this, but I think our priorities have gotten totally out of whack in this culture, and I'm guessing most of my readers would agree. So, perhaps I'm just preaching to the choir here, but still I think these things are important to voice and reaffirm. We all need to sit down and do a personal accounting of our own priorities and how they fit in with a sustainable future. Those of us lucky enough to have money to spend, how are we spending it? Those of us lucky enough to have able bodies and minds, how are we using them?

Too many folks are out of touch with what goes into the most basic element of our survival: food. Most people don't even know what's in their food, never mind what it would take to make a real approximation of the things they eat without all the refinement and additives. And the really sad part is that most don't even care. Food security isn't even on the radar for most Americans, and if Katrina is any kind of lesson, they'll be wandering the streets in a disaster situation, looting the convenience stores until all the twinkies and chip bags and bottled liquid are gone wondering what the hell to do next.

So as much as I've tried to dismantle the idea of self-reliance, I'm now wanting to prop it back up with a somewhat different twist—intertwined with gratitude and respect.

Part of the gift self-reliance gives us is the realization of value and the understanding of labor. The idea of being able to go into a glaringly fluorescent grocery store open 24 hours a day and purchase a jar of jam off the shelves for just a couple bucks boggles my mind now that I understand the value and labor contained within one of my jars of jam.

Of course, five years ago I didn't give it a second thought—where else would jam come from but a grocery store? Because I was raised in a world where everything came from a store. Growing food and preserving it were what my people did in the Depression because they were too poor to do anything else. (Of course my maternal grandparents, both of whom grew up on farms, were fond of pointing out that they were also too poor to know anything different and they always had plenty to eat.)

The gift that my own journey towards self-reliance offers my children is the knowledge that everything need not come from a store. It demonstrates the amount of work that goes into growing the berries, harvesting the berries, and preserving the berries to make that tasty jam. But also there is the awareness that we did not grow the sugar that goes into those preserves and we did not make the electricity that pumps and heats our water. That awareness, in turn, generates gratitude for the luxury the big bag of sugar and the flow of electricity represent.

Of course, these kinds of things are just glimpses into the ideal that flickers on the cave of my brain, and my household only ever approximates this ideal, myself included... lest anyone think that I'm touting some kind of perfection or claiming to have it all figured out over here where the grass is greener. My kids vacillate between an amazing grasp of knowing where food comes from and what goes into producing it and falling into the typical consumer mindset of whining and pining. I vacillate between having my feet firmly planted on solid ground and wistfully admiring a pretty sweater worn by a CSA member, remembering a time when I spent money on hair and clothes, remembering my hands, which although never glamorous, didn't look as if they belonged to a mechanic.

Oh, sure, I could scapegoat our consumer culture, television, technology, whatever for this vain longing in myself and the consumer ennui of my children, but the dilemma is really about living with a foot in two different worlds and how we navigate that dilemma because, as I said in an earlier post, we can't live in isolation as if the entire world, such as it is, didn't exist.

So how do we straddle that fence between two such different worlds?

Well, personally, I don't want to straddle it. I want to redefine and keep more of my choices on my side of the fence, the part where I can actually have some effect. But I want to be able to do this in a way that respects how others around me want to define their side of the fence as well, and that's meant embracing some things that I might choose differently because after all, I'm choosing to spend my life with those I love on the same side of the fence.

Part of that redefinition includes, as I've said, the paradoxical relationship of independence and interdependence. By taking responsibility for such things as food, health, and education and becoming independent of elaborate social systems designed to replace our own brains with experts, governments, codes, and laws, half of which are designed to protect us from ourselves, or at the very least to keep us from thinking for ourselves, we become more capable of interacting from a place of personal empowerment. Through our own independence, we're more able to realize an interdependence among autonomous parties, lending individual strength to the larger whole. Gone is a servile dependence or blind acceptance that builds a community based on tyranny and ignorance.

So many of these ideas are easy to pay lip-service, or to ponder obsessively while performing manual labor in the field, for instance, but they're not always so easy to implement.

Like I said: Simple. Basic. But not necessarily easy.

Walking the walk for me has meant embracing the very foundation of self-reliance: liberty. Liberty as an ideal needs to apply to everyone, or it's not really liberty at all but just another form of dictatorship, however benevolent it may be. And it's that part of the American myth of self-reliance that I seek to root out and replace with gratitude and respect. It's that part that I think the founding fathers—idealists like Jefferson—got wrong because they couldn't quite imagine humanity extended to women, people of color, or children. The revolutionary ideals of equality were, unfortunately, nourished in the intellectual soil of the benevolent master, and the vestiges of those ideas continue to inform the current myths of self-reliance.

Like so many things in life, my thoughts in this series really can be boiled down to just a few cliches:

1) No man is an island entire of himself;

2) Live simply so that others may simply live;

3) Do unto others as you would have done to you (or better yet, as they would have done to them).

But sometimes those cliches are worth unpacking a bit because even though the journey to get there is a bit longer, the devil, as they say, is in the details, and it's only by taking the time to consider and understand the details that we can consider and know our selves. And in knowing the self and its relationship to the world around it, to all the things necessary to sustain the self, we begin to understand that there is no such thing as self-reliance but only an embedded and embodied self in a particular historical moment.

Simple Living the Easy Way, Part III

So, we left off with the myth of self-reliance and the underlying guilt that I suspect fuels the perpetuation of that myth. The big question, as I see it, is why Western culture in general, but American culture more specifically, has at its center the idea of self-reliance as a moral virtue?

I would argue that the whole idea of the individual, independent or dependent, is a product of the Enlightenment and the colonial culture that went along with it. Prior to roughly the 18th century or so, "individual" wasn't a Western concept in the same way it is now. People were part of larger wholes: family, church, community. At the time when John Donne wrote his "No Man is an Island" meditation in 1624, death was an ever-present part of life, and community was integral to survival. People felt strongly their connection to and embeddedness in larger systems, and it's that sense of connection that Donne sought to convey:

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

As real property and the aristocracy began to erode and the middle class arose triumphant on the wave of colonial consumption in the 17 and 1800's, the idea of the self-made man—the individual as we have inherited the concept—was born. Philosophy and literature were heady with the infinite possibility presented by the self-made man, never mind the nagging little fact that he was made on the backs of women, children, and people of color who didn't get to self-define.

Well, there was a whole lot more history in there, but that's the general gist of things. Writers like Locke and Hobbes paved the way for thinkers like Wordsworth over in England and his Romantic counterparts Thoreau and Emerson over in America decades later, who eventually gave way to Whitman, radical individualist and author of "Song of Myself," a celebration of that particular brand of rugged American individualism. Over on the continent, Friedrich Nietzsche was extolling his very own version of radical individualism in works like Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.

Radical individualism, then, is a huge part of Western consciousness, built over centuries of political and social thought. So, too, is it an important part of the American dream and a deeply rooted meme in the American psyche. Think Marlboro Man. Only, the Marlboro Man didn't have a wife or children, did he?

No. What we get instead is a very different version of homesteading independence when families are involved, but still with the rugged patriarchal figurehead firmly at the helm. Think Pa Ingalls, who moves his family from one place to another in search of his own illusive self-reliant masculinity only to be thwarted at nearly every turn by the government, the weather, and just plain bad luck—not to mention haunted at the margins by rebellious natives. Maybe a more admirable figurehead is Mr. Wilder who discourses persuasively with Almanzo on the true freedom enjoyed by the self-reliant farmer versus the servile dependence of the businessman in town. But he, too, even in his level-headedness represents the benevolent master in all his glory.

What I'm seeking here—both in this long-winded post and in my life on our homestead—is not a replication of that kind of authoritarian self-reliance that depends upon the unacknowledged work of others but rather a kind of interdependence that seeks its model outside the pervasive myths of our culture, leaving guilt and force behind.

What does that model look like, you might ask?

Well, that's a really good question to which I can only respond that, for me, that model is unfolding day by day... in the thousand little steps of the journey and the thousand little ways in which I respond to those around me: partner, children, animals, plants, soil, creatures, earth, universe.

Some moments are better than others, and I work in harmony with the life forces I share this independence with, following a mutual path of least resistance and least harm. Other moments, I lose my way and find myself resorting to force. But something—usually the utter ineffectuality of trying to force a particular outcome—jolts me awake to a more mindful way of relating and I come back to the knowledge that I am only a very small part of what holds this self-reliance together even as I am, paradoxically, a huge part of it.

Simple Living the Easy Way, Part II*

Someone brought up an interesting point about guilt in a comment: "I for one would have no guilt from having machines to help me conserve time, especially if I was able to get off the national electrical grid.... With enough solar panels, a wind machine, and a couple good banks of batteries, you could get off the grid and rid yourself of any guilt you might be feeling."

I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, that one might identify what I'm talking about as "guilt" as well as the psychology of that interpretation, and second, it nicely illustrates the paradox I was getting at in the first part of this series: that we are dependent in our very independence.

And really, those two points of interest are intertwined, for it's that sense of guilt, I think, that perpetuates the insistent denial of our own dependence, that willful erasure of our dependence in romanticized notions of self-reliance.

Sure, it goes back to that whole "no man is an island" kind of thing, but I think there's a complexity here that's worth exploring a bit to see why Donne's words resonate even today. What does it mean to be self-reliant? Is there such thing as an independent self or is that a myth, a story we tell ourselves? And if it's a story, then why is it such an important story?

And to come back around to the guilt for a minute, why is it that we associate using one kind of machine with guilt, but then turn around and believe that our guilt would be expiated if the same thing were powered by something made by different machines? I'm not trying to pick on Tim here; rather, I think he reveals a sticking point of trying to think through these tough issues: that is, the moral attachment to a particular kind of machine use.

Why is one machine better than another? I think, too, this is what folks are getting at when they try to get us to think more critically about embedded energy costs of things like solar and wind and even buying local. Solar is far from zero carbon, so why should a machine powered by solar be inherently better than one powered by connection to the grid?

In large part, it's the moral value we attach to solar, which I would argue has an awful lot to do with the difficulty of calculating the embedded energy of photovoltaics. Some figures place the embedded energy payback for solar at 4 years: in other words, it takes 4 years for a solar panel to produce as much energy as it cost to produce the panel itself. So 1/5th of the energy produced during the solar panel warranty period (generally 20 years, some are 25) comes from fossil fuels. One can't even make the argument that this is a one-time energy input for a lifetime of energy independence, what with the batteries and inverters required for an on-demand system, most of which have a lifespan of 5-10 years. In fact, the embedded energy costs of those aren't even factored into the 4 year recovery period for the silicon cell panels themselves, best I can tell.

See how this all becomes very complex very quickly? Once we factor in the embedded costs of batteries and inverters, not to mention the waste issue once they're done and the ecological impact of that, the equation becomes far more difficult. Solar, wind, hydro, coal, nuclear, natural gas—they all have their advantages and pitfalls. And it all depends on how we use them and to what extent. None is a free ride.

This kind of complexity is the problem with all those online carbon footprint calculators or with the kinds of calculations out there about what a meat-based meal, for instance, costs in terms of carbon. All burgers are not created equal, just as all lifestyles are not created equal. Is my use of a bread machine more or less justifiable than some urban socialite's use of one? If so, why?

Because of the whole lifestyle picture or not at all. But how does one calculate an entire lifestyle?

By the same token, however, that urban socialite could still have a lower carbon impact than I, depending upon how one wanted to calculate it. Living in a small apartment, not being home much of the day due to work and running in fashionable circles, being able to walk to all the great restaurants where cooking is being done on a mass scale, which arguably conserves resources, she might have an ostensibly lower carbon footprint than my meat-raising, meat-eating, rural, homeschooling, homesteading household. So, how does one account for that? Is it more eco-friendly to be a single urban dweller?

Maybe I need to just keep planting a boat-load of trees every year to offset my household's usage? Do I get carbon credits for farming organically and sustainably, for having carbon-sequestering pastures, for having self-sustaining garden inputs? Do I get carbon credits for feeding more families than just mine? Do I get carbon credits for all those institutions we avoid like school and doctors and pharmaceuticals? Is my electrical usage even comparable to a childless urban apartment dwelling couple, and how do they calculate the embedded energy costs that make their low-impact lifestyle possible?

So the Luddites in the crowd are probably nodding along at this point, as all this seems to reinforce the argument for moving away from energy intensive living altogether. And I think this really is a large part of the answer—going low-tech as much as possible.

But again, I'd argue that even this line of thinking operates under a certain kind of disillusionment that there is such a thing as moving away from energy intensive living. As I claimed in my earlier post, low tech is really just another form of alternative energy: exchanging human energy for electrical energy. Energy has to come from somewhere: it's the basic law of conservation of energy—you can't get more energy out than you put in. (Though we're awfully fond of inventing stories about such magic. And why not? That would really be independent living with impunity.)

Even the tools required for manual labor need to be mined, manufactured, and moved, so they have embedded energy costs as well. There's a treadmill effect of certain kinds of manual labor, too, that often gets ignored. Things like plowing or hauling that require the work of large draft animals necessitate the feeding of those animals, generating more plowing and planting and harvesting that need to be done just to support those animals. Unless of course one relies on off-farm feed inputs, in which case we're right back where we started: dependence on others to support our chosen lifestyle.

So what am I getting at? What am I advocating here? Am I really suggesting that we should just throw up our hands and use electricity no matter what the source?

No. What I'm really trying to do is to problematize the idea of self-reliance altogether because I think it's a notion that serves a kind of holier-than-thou perspective when really we are all complicit, all making trading offs and setting priorities no matter what our chosen path. And I believe that most often, these trade offs are what enable us to support our continued belief in the illusion of self-reliance in the first place.

Which brings me back around to the ideas of guilt and why the self-reliance story is such an important one to tell ourselves, which I'll try to explore more fully in my next post in this series.





*Just for the record, Jim really wanted me to title this post "Complex Living the Hard Way." Silly man.

Simple Living the Easy Way

Yeah, I know some of you who have commented on how much work we've been doing around here lately might be thinking, "Huh? What's easy?" Well, I've been thinking on this subject for quite some time with all the blog memes about what one would be willing or not willing to give up, and I'll tell you exactly what's "easy" about how I do things: my tools. And not all of those tools are manual. Many of them are electric, for which I am very grateful.

I work hard every single day, often from dawn to dusk it seems and even into the night as I try to catch up on the indoor work that needs to be done. As hard as I try to conserve water, electricity, gasoline, etc. and reduce our impact on this earth, there are lots of areas where I'm just not willing to cut back further at this point in time. Not, that is, until I have a few more pairs of hands other than my own helping me out with what needs doing in a day.

What folks often forget or simply don't know when they wax nostalgic about life before electricity and cheap oil is that even the lower classes had domestic help. All but the poorest of families often had some kind of labor, either day labor or live in, for help with all the work that needed to get done. Indentured servants, apprentices, extended family, itinerant workers, and, unfortunately, slaves all served the purpose of providing extra hands for the household. Those families that didn't have one of the above had their children, and those children weren't given the choice whether to help out.

I know, too, that there are people who feel rather nostalgic about children's responsibility as well, thinking that kids these days ought to be made to feel that same kind of responsibility—often packaged with a "sense of pride in helping out"—that kids did prior to the child-centered culture of today. This is not a sentiment that I share.

I don't think it's possible in the midst of our current culture to recapture that sense of pride in contribution because it's plainly arbitrary and enforced. No matter how noble our intentions of going back, to borrow Kunstler's title, to a world made by hand, the truth of the matter is that just next door the world is still made of electricity and oil, and little Johnny or Jenny knows that. There is no real or tangible sense that their forced manual labor contributes either to the family's survival or to the earth's health. The first is bogus and the second is far too abstract for any of us to really know for sure, even those of us choosing to power down.

But I digress....

... and in an effort to wrench this post away from rant and back towards my point, let me just quickly say that I don't require my kids to pitch in any more than they're comfortable and happy to because the principles I live by are just that: my principles. My kids are free to choose their own, just as Jim is free to choose his own principles, and honestly, they don't always include living as if it's the 17th century. This homesteading path we're on is one that I've lead them down, so I try to be mindful of that fact and not foist my choices on them any more than necessary. Luckily, they're a pretty amenable bunch.

All of this is, let's face it, a long-winded way of justifying my own continued reliance on certain tools. I'm the first to admit that I'm no purist.

Sure, I could make bread by hand, but that would require time, taking me away from other tasks that also need (knead?) my attention. Having a bread machine lets me take 5 minutes, tops, to make dough each day, after which I can simply turn on the oven and bake delicious bread at home. Having a stand mixer means I can make baked goods in a fraction of the time it would take to complete the same task with only a wire whisk and my own two hands. I'd be lost without my stand mixer and my oven, and at the moment, I'm no where close to willing to give those up.

Could I live without them? Sure I could, but that doesn't mean I should. There are plenty of things that I've foregone for the sake of conservation, but there are certain economies that come into play that don't simply involve energy—they also involve health, quality of life, and time. Being able to cut certain corners frees me to do other things like read and play with my kids, arguably important activities for a homeschooling mom.

More than that, there are some things, like my milk machine, that save my body. This machine means the difference between waking up multiple times at night with significant pain versus a good night's sleep that keeps me healthy, happy, and relatively pleasant to be around. That's worth running the machine for about 15 minutes a day to me. There are other tasks that don't have the same impact, so I choose to reduce on those terms.

Doing everything by hand takes a significant physical toll. I know because I do most things by hand, including my gardening, carrying feed bags and hauling water to my animals. I'd venture to guess that most Americans don't know what it's like to do a day's worth of manual labor. We're so used to using machines or paying others to do such tasks that we've lost touch with the bodily impact of hard work. (Heck, half the time Americans aren't even willing to take on this kind of work, so we turn to immigrants, legal or otherwise, to do it for us.) That's one reason life expectancies were so much lower—people simply worked themselves into the ground. There's a fine line between physical work that keeps one healthy and strong and so much work that it grinds a body down.

Machines replace human labor, and the two big questions when moving away from machines are how many people it will take to perform the same amount of work and how much time.

Too often in discussions of the energy crisis I notice a kind of draconian split between the Luddites, who want to return to a pastoral age blissfully free of noisy machines, on the one hand, and the "alternative technologies will save us" folks on the other. I have to admit that I'm kinda on the fence of that little dichotomy. My ears certainly long for the peace and quiet of the first, but my practical side remains firmly rooted in the reality that I like a little help now and then, and I'm not too keen on moving back to the slave economy that supported Western life before the cotton gin, steam engine, and the decades it took for American culture to let go of the direct exploitation and ownership of human beings.

Folks need to start considering what it would take to move away from industrial agriculture. Those big ol' tractors and machines perform the work of 100 people in a fraction of the time. In large part, the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution enabled the move away from a culture of slavery, though that certainly didn't happen instantly or cleanly or even quickly, as opportunists double-dipped into both systems for greatest profit, increasing slave trade during the transition.

Ultimately, however, by transferring our work load from human bodies to machines, Americans stepped into the modern age with the noble delusion of freedom firmly rooted in industrialism and capitalism. The question becomes then, in my mind, not so much whether we're either slaveholders of people or slaves to our machines, which so many modern critics have claimed, but rather what is the balance point between manual and machine labor?

Or maybe not even a balance point at all, but a completely different way of relating to the world and labor, a different kind of lifestyle that is more self-reliant, thus eliminating the blind dependence on either the labor of others or the labor of machines. Is there a space where we can move outside of a capitalist or industrial paradigm that looks outside ourselves for subsistence and, instead, turns inward, looking towards the self as responsible for its own subsistence? Isn't this a more honest definition of freedom and liberty? Self-Reliance, or preferable to Emerson's privileged self, perhaps Thoreau's vision of deliberate living in the woods but with certain well-chosen tools. (Though let's face it, even he was dependent on Emerson's money and privilege, which doesn't always come through when reading his idealistic treatise.)

Or does this hope entail yet another privileged, Romantic version of life that seeks to erase or at least hide our messy dependence upon the exploitation of machine, people, animals, land, etc. Is it even possible for humans to live on this earth in a way that doesn't depend upon exploitation? Can we come to a place of symbiosis and what would that look like? Can we even begin to imagine it from this place where we now stand?

Those are some pretty tough questions, and I certainly don't claim to have all the answers. I have some thoughts, the beginnings of some ponderings though. I think the path forward is one that looks a bit like Thoreau's Walden but with a full and humbled acknowledgment of our privileged dependence. Perhaps it is through recognizing and taking responsibility for the paradoxical dependence on others to enable our own self-reliance that we achieve freedom without delusion, that we enter into autonomous rather than exploitative relations. Maybe.

Me? I'm going out to milk my cow with a machine, both of which I'm damn grateful to have.

Food Security, Part III

What's in your yard?

Think of it as a new commercial: replace the tired image of a barbarian asking what's in your wallet with a perky—even sprightly—elf asking what's in your yard.

Could you eat off your land? What if you couldn't get to the grocery store... what if the trucks couldn't get to the grocery? Would you and your family have fresh food?

We all know there are no guarantees in life. Jobs are lost, freak storms happen, and much worse. Nita, the matron of husbandry from Throwback at Trapper Creek, demonstrates the hard way that not even the best laid plans can thwart mother nature. The trick is to cover several fronts at a time. In diversity there is security. Or, don't put all your eggs in one basket. (Going back to the land, so many cliches come clear.)

One of the reasons I wanted to break this topic into a series, besides just keeping it manageable, was to demonstrate the different facets of food security and the ways each complements the other. If all your food is coming from one place, then that should be a major red flag. And by "one place" I don't mean the Piggly Wiggly versus Super Wal-Mart. Sure, that's obvious to most of us, but maybe not so to others. Look around for a minute and assess how many others will be turning toward the same food sources in an emergency. Population density as well as the severity of the emergency will dictate how secure your food sources are. That's the advantage of the pantry: you're likely to be the only one shopping there. But the pantry is by no means your only resource.

Insulation from emergencies or hard times rests upon reducing dependence on outside systems. Not eliminating it, necessarily, which I riffed on in the self-reliance series, but reducing it as much as possible. But insulation also comes through having multiple resources that back each other up, the whole being stronger than the part. The freezer backs up the pantry which backs up the yard. Fall back and redundancy are key.

The yard provides valuable fresh food and can do so year round in many, many places in countless ways, but you'll need to how to take advantage of them. For instance, did you know that fir and pine needles contain loads of vitamin C and that the bark has medicinal properties? Can you identify which evergreens are nourishing and which are poisonous? Do you know what a yew looks like and why to avoid it? Don't just take my word for it; do the research. The point is that yards can nourish us in more ways than one, and while gardens are an obvious resource, landscaping can be just as important, as can weeds. Dandelion leaves are often available long into winter for a nourishing salad where I live. Common purslane and chickweed appear in the spring and provide whopping nutrition for their size, rich in vitamins, minerals, and even protein!

So, what's in your yard?

Beginning with just that simple question opens up so many possibilities for food security before ever even planting a garden. Assess what's already growing and stop applying herbicides if you haven't already—they're bad for the earth, bad for the bugs, and they're ridding your yard of valuable food both for you and the bees, among other creatures. Look at all tiers of your yard from trees to shrubs to weeds and try to envision an integrated and holistic system working at multiple levels, with the vegetable garden as just one part. Look into edible landscaping and forest gardening for starters. Then consider wildcrafting and herbal medicine thrown in for good measure.

A large yard isn't a necessity. Once you begin thinking of outside space as an extension of food security rather than strictly ornamental curb appeal, play space, or just wasted space, the number of options available even in the tiniest of yards multiply. Even apartment dwellers with access to the outside or renters can create container gardens that offer at least some food sources, and even a large sunny window presents the opportunity for an indoor herb garden. Of course, larger properties offer nearly infinite possibilities, and it may be helpful to separate bigger parcels into zones to make projects more manageable. That's one of the beauties of the forest garden: it can take quite a bit of work to set up an ecosystem, but the goal is a self-sustaining copy of nature's methods, allowing that system to do most of the work.

The Usserys of Boxwood, a 2.5 acre homestead in Virginia, offer one of the best examples online of forest gardening with limited space. If you haven't already encountered Harvey Ussery's articles in one of several publications, you'll be delighted to get to know him through his website, which is incredibly informative. Another excellent example of how much can be done in a really small space is the Dervaes family, homesteading on 1/5th of an acre in urban California. I've recommended both these sites before and have links to each in my sidebar resources in case you're looking for them later. They're the two best sites I know of for homesteading in small spaces, but please feel free to share other resources in the comments section.

Here at Touch the Earth farm, we have less than an acre in actual garden production, and I'm working to transform our 5.25 acres into a more integrated whole, an ongoing project that will take years. When we bought the property it was a horse farm, with a lovely 3-stall barn and several acres of pasture in dire need of renovation and shade. The first thing I did when we moved in was to plant some fruit trees close to the house because they take so long to get established. I planted 3 dwarf varieties of apple, 2 dwarf pear, 1 plum, 1 cherry, 1 fig, 1 peach, and 6 blueberries, making sure that the single varieties were self-fruiting. I got the majority of my stock from Edible Landscaping in Afton, Virginia, an excellent little company whose catalog is worth getting for the info and ideas alone. Last year I planted 50 saplings to provide shade for the pastures, food for the bees, and potentially, firewood for us.

Planning 10 or 20 years down the road can be difficult, especially in our nomadic culture, but true food security depends upon it. On the one hand, a person with large financial resources could certainly plant trees on a grand scale by simply purchasing them all at once. I, on the other hand, have opted to buy seed stock and gradually expand our plantings myself, requiring an even longer term point of view. I've been dividing and expanding my berries for the past two years, hoping to let them naturalize in different parts of the homestead. The first year I lost most of the plants to a severe summer drought, but I think last year's transplants took pretty well—about 350 strawberry plants and 50 raspberries. This year, I'm hoping to focus on grafting some of our fruit trees to begin creating a small orchard in one of the upper pastures, and we'll continue to divide our berries, planting on different parts of the property. (Matron of husbandry has an excellent post on grafting that's well worth checking out.)


Luckily, not all projects are so long term, and there are many gratifying ones that offer short-term returns. The most obvious is the summer vegetable garden. Lots of folks are already comfortable with growing a summer garden, so a great way to expand upon that is to consider adding an herb garden, a spring/ fall garden, and even a winter garden. Finding ways to grow fresh produce year round will make a huge difference both for the wallet and the environment, not to mention health since the fresher the produce, the more nutrients it has. While fresh, raw produce is nearly always preferable from a nutritional standpoint over preserved, growing your own also has the added security of knowing exactly what goes into the soil and onto the produce—no added chemicals, colors, waxes, etc. I've gotten so spoiled by fresh produce year round that I don't bother preserving certain things like green beans that never taste so great anyway. I spend my time preserving other things that offer both nutrition and taste satisfaction.

We built our first high tunnel for winter gardening in 2007 and just added a second in fall of 2008. After making the plunge, I won't be without some form of winter garden as long as I'm able. I'm still fine-tuning my winter growing, but having a dedicated space has helped tremendously because I'm not stuck waiting for summer plantings to give up the ghost before I can get winter crops started, many of which need to be in as early as July to really get growing before the days shorten. Some, like leeks and parsnips have such a long growing season that they need to be started even earlier to be ready by fall and winter. Starting plants in seed trays helps get a jump on the season if there are still things in the ground, and I've also found even with the crops I direct sow that having a back up seed tray allows me to fill in any gaps that may occur for whatever reason. The two photos above show our high tunnels after having endured temps in the teens this month. The bare looking areas have small lettuces that will do little growing over the winter, but will have a real jump on the spring season as the days get longer.

Growing cold-tolerant crops is key, and in our zone 6 climate I find I don't really need a double layer of protection for most of the crops I grow. Currently, I'm growing tatsoi, kale, chard, bok choi, spinach, several varieties of endive and lettuce, arugula, green onions, turnip greens, beet greens, thyme, citrus thyme, rosemary, cilantro, flat leaf and curly parsley, oregano, sorrel, chervil, carrots, and radishes. Outside the tunnel, I have broccoli, more kale, and several cabbages, and I just harvested the last rows of turnips, carrots, and leeks to bring into the garage. Winter produce often won't be quite as pristine as that grown in milder weather, but most blemishes can be cut out or worked around.

Gardening itself can be a steep learning curve, but so can learning to eat seasonally, which is truly the only way to eat locally. I've found food tastes so much better fresh that limiting myself to seasonal eating isn't very difficult at all. The hardest part for me was broadening my cooking repertoire, and a few choice cookbooks really helped on that front. Pretty much anything by Alice Waters will be invaluable because of her focus on vegetarian dishes; same goes for the Moosewood cookbooks. There are also several farmer's market cookbooks out now, which focus on seasonally available produce and the meals that can be built around it. Committing to trying a new dish at least once a week can quickly offer experience and familiarity with new vegetables. I've found that doing this during the summer when life naturally slows a bit makes it more manageable and less stressful.

I'm including some of my favorite books below. Please offer your own recommendations in the comments section—the more the merrier!



Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, the winter gardening bible, this is a definite must have if you're considering growing year round. He has loads of useful info, tables, varieties, etc.










Fresh From the Farmer's Market by Jane Fletcher.












Local Flavors by Deborah Madison.











The Farmer's Market Cookbook by Richard Ruben.

Crude Awakening, or Preparing for Peak Oil

Okay, so I've known about peak oil for a while but have deliberately chosen not to go there and nurture my tendency to focus on gloom and doom—basically the same reason that I don't watch nightly news broadcasts or the kinds of tv dramas that scream "be afraid!" I find it easier to live from a place of peace and joy when I resist allowing fear and negativity to seep into my thoughts. Broad scope knowledge that enables me to move in the direction of change is a good thing; wallowing in obsessive worry over the unknown, not so good.

This past week, I decided to let little bits of information into my insulated world via the documentary A Crude Awakening, figuring it wouldn't be nearly so apocalyptic as Kunstler's The Long Emergency, if his blog and other folks' reaction to his book are any indication. (Of course, then I did have to put a hold on the one copy of his book available in my library system, so I'm sure I'll post once I've read it. It is almost winter after all, and I'm looking for some thought-provoking reading material.)

Did the documentary tell me anything I didn't already know? No, but it did offer some thoughtful sound bytes, like the idea that our grandchildren may never know the possibility of air travel. Little things like that make perfect sense when I hear them, but I'd just never quite framed the reality in mundane terms like that. The problem, however, is that I've now let the doomsday scenarios that had previously haunted my walks through the pasture become more than just niggling little what-ifs and take on the insidious form of pressure to prepare and doubts of whether we're doing enough.

But what is enough? That's the real question, isn't it. Because few people in the circles I travel would argue that peak oil is a reality (extended family aside), though there would be lively debate as to whether it has already occurred or is still impending in the next few decades. The real point of debate and conjecture is what the heck to prepare for...as the possibilities range from the rational historically-based Great Depression scenarios or the more recent Katrina disaster scenario to the relatively benign throw-back to another era scenarios all the way to the post-apocalyptic Day After scenarios, the violent and anarchic Mad-Max worlds (or Waterworld if you want to toss in the global warming twist), or the urban, government gone mad Escape from New York.

So, just where do we look to prepare—to the world of grim reality or to the dystopic realities created by writers and artists and our own worst imaginings?

After some serious consideration, I'll be approaching the idea of preparation much like I approached the topic itself: by empowering myself and my family to live well and as independently as possible. Life itself can be lost in preparation for the unknown—an irony I don't wish experience.

So, in spirit of the notion that preparation is in the living and inspired by a thread over at the peakoil message boards, I submit my own 5 rules for Peak Oil prep, some of which jibe with the survivalist fanatics and some of which most definitely do not.

1) Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die: This goes back to the idea that life itself can be lost in preparation. I could spend all my time, energy and money becoming a survivalist, learning to make fire and eat grubs, and then get hit by a bus before gas prices top $5 a gallon here in the states. In the meantime, I'd have lost many wonderful opportunities for delicious food and joy in the moment—a fear-based transaction I'm unwilling to make. I don't believe in starving myself or my family—both metaphorically and literally—to prepare for the possibility of starvation in some uncertain future. Instead, I'll eat well, stay strong as long as luck and body hold out, and enjoy my time here and now, which brings me to my second rule.

2) Forge strong and meaningful relationships: for these are the stuff of life. By this rule I mean relationships with myself, my partner, my children and my community. If we fail to take the time to get to know ourselves or our family, those on whom we will count heartily in any of the potential scenarios, we will have no foundation of internal strength. Too much of modern life fractures families and personal relationships, forcing people to spend more time away from one another than together and championing adversarial relationships between parents and children, men and women, neighbor and neighbor.

3) Become more independent: Although seemingly contradictory to rule #2, the paradox is that as we become more independent, we become more able to enter into meaningful relationships with others. Only through our own autonomy can we act as fully actualized human beings because only through our own autonomy can we know ourselves honestly and fully. Also potentially paradoxical is that by "independent" I don't mean isolated—we come to know ourselves in part through our contact with others. But I do mean self-reliant: from government systems, from non-renewable resources, from unsustainable food chains, from mindless consumption, and from allowing others to think for us.

4) Acquire Mindfully: Of course, the flip side to avoiding mindless consumption is to acquire mindfully, and this is perhaps the most difficult rule for me personally. While we've been trying to move toward simplicity, I'm definitely not the most frugal gal around, though I try. We've become much more seasonal and local eaters, which has gone a long way toward this rule. My goal is to continue to find ways to trim expenses and to make our purchases with an eye towards long-term use value. We'll be privileging homestead infrastructure, manual tools, quality and longevity, self-reliance, sustainability, and skill building.

5) Cultivate Knowledge: Homesteading itself is excellent preparation, so in many ways, we'll just keep on keepin' on. Each day, each month, each year here at the farmstead, we learn new skills, adding to our knowledge base, and we become that much more independent. We're building our library, expanding our research, adding to our practical experience. In the two years we've been here, we've learned about butchering and preserving, husbandry and natural care, building and electrical, weather and earth, planning and flexibility, gardening and direct marketing. Not only will we be spending more time learning on the farm, but we'll also be spending more time doing things as a family like camping and rock climbing—activities we've always enjoyed and that now offer a whole different advantage, ensuring that the kids grow up with solid grounding in practical skills.

Will we be the most prepared folks around? No, but chances are that we'll be positioned better than many and have the solid emotional core to back up our skills and provisions regardless of what the future holds.